


The Kindest Cut

by rivkat



Category: Smallville
Genre: BDSM elements, Eight crazy nights, M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 04:00:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt: what if Clark's experience of pleasure had been as muffled as his experience of pain, leaving him desperate to feel?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kindest Cut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avidrosette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avidrosette/gifts).



In Clark’s head, it went like this:

Lex ran his curled fist along the line of Clark’s cheek, a parody of a caress. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said. The Kryptonite of his ring scraped Clark’s skin, a line of agony, and Clark couldn’t even groan, flat on the ground and waiting for Lex’s next blow.

Lex pulled back, elegant even in his crouch, and examined Clark’s body like it was a sculpture he was considering buying. Clark closed his eyes and tried to gather his strength.

“… Wait,” Lex said, revelation lighting up his voice, and it wasn’t just nausea making Clark’s stomach tighten. “You _like_ this.”

Back in his apartment, Clark gasped and came, his fingers so tight around himself that he would’ve turned coal into diamond. The _Planet_ ’s sex columnist advised male readers to try different approaches, loose grips and tight grips, short strokes and long ones, so they wouldn’t get to the point where sex with a partner was difficult. Clark was well beyond that point, and had been for a long time.

****

It wasn’t until a week after Lex Luthor had released him from the scarecrow that Clark could think about it without wanting to throw up. He’d never felt like that. Pain: how his mother felt when she burned her fingers on a dish hot from the oven, or Dad when he hammered his hand instead of the nail.

As the Smallville meteor freakshow accelerated, pain became a more regular visitor. Clark hated it, because it meant that people were in danger. He hated the way meteor mutants would throw him around when he was weak from exposure.

It took him a while to realize that he didn’t have a problem with the pain itself. At first he thought he’d kept Lana’s necklace, safe in its armored box, because he wanted something that had been close to Lana. He’d open the lid every few days, making sure it was still there, flinching at the wave of weakness that hit him as the meteor rock flared brilliantly green.

Eventually, he started opening it every night.

****

Like a priest, Clark had a vocation. He wouldn’t trade being Superman for human touches. He’d lost his powers before, and it had always, always ended badly. Since the very first time, he’d known that, and he hadn’t even been able to appreciate the ability to feel sensations, too busy thinking about how to get his powers back. Red Kryptonite provided the urge but not the capability; he’d ended up cutting himself with green Kryptonite he’d shaped into a knife.

When he’d lost the red K ring, he’d kept the knife.

And when Lois twisted and wriggled because the tag of her shirt was rubbing at her the wrong way, or when Jimmy yelped and swatted at the ant that was tickling his leg, Clark _wanted_. 

****

He had it under control. Yes, he knew that plenty of self-injurers said that, but he was invulnerable and healed as soon as he shut his lead box, which meant he wasn’t taking the same kinds of risks. And he’d learned well that he had to let people make their own choices, even bad ones; why shouldn’t the same charity apply to him? He literally wasn’t hurting anyone else.

****

His tolerance was pretty high now. Mere exposure didn’t shake him up the way it used to, which had major benefits for those times that bad guys got their hands on Kryptonite—he was physically vulnerable, yes, but he could slog through that, and he borrowed technology from Bruce to harden his uniform for those situations.

Clark wasn’t going to pretend that was the _reason_ he did it: he lied to enough people in his life. But he wasn’t going to deny the benefits of his … sensation-seeking, either.

****

When Lex did find out, the revelation was almost anticlimactic. Clark had made it his business not to be in the same room with Lex for the last few decades, except when a Superman-Luthor confrontation occurred by accident. (The one thing Superman knew that Clark hadn’t was that Lex didn’t react well to lectures; Superman had to teach his lessons through public exposure and private enforcement, neither of which required direct contact.)

Then Lex was elected, and there was a whole thing about the Justice League and sovereignty, lots of shouting and fearmongering, and somehow Lex managed to be the one to get them to Camp David to negotiate a modus operandi.

Of course Superman was at the center of the photo op, right by the President’s side. When Lex shook Clark’s hand for the cameras, he leaned in and said, “I’m sorry about earlier.”

Clark just managed to stop the un-Supermanlike “hunh?” that wanted to come out. Smallville earlier? Metropolis earlier? He raised one eyebrow instead—cool and collected. Pure Superman.

“I was stepping on your foot the entire time they were arranging the rest of the participants for the photo,” Lex said, smiling as the cameras clicked. “It was entirely unintentional, I assure you.”

“Oh,” Clark said. “Not a problem.”

“No, I suppose not,” Lex said. If Clark had looked, he probably could have seen Lex’s tricky, convoluted neurons firing.

And when Clark asked, Bruce provided the (highly illegally obtained, but what Clark couldn’t stop he could use) footage of Lex in the Oval Office, reviewing the footage of fight after fight, captured on cellphones and high-tech news cameras and everything in between, always focusing in on Clark.

****

So when the call came, routed untraceably through the Watchtower, Clark was pretty much expecting it. 

“I won’t pretend we’re friends,” Lex said, and even now Clark felt a pang. If Lex knew—but Lex already knew too much. “But it seems to me that I can provide something that you want, and I very much want to give it to you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark said, weakly.

“Do you really want me to say it while Batman is listening?” Lex didn’t wait long for Clark’s non-answer. “You have my word that any deal we make will conform to your parameters.”

Lex could well be telling the truth. The pure satisfaction of beating Superman up might suffice for him.

Someone else—Lex—touching him, making him feel it. Not in danger, not real, but real _enough_.

“I’ll come to the White House,” Clark said. (And rip out Bruce’s cameras while he was at it, despite the paranoiac fit Bruce was going to throw.)

****

“You’ll need a safe word,” Lex said, standing in his terrifying, lead-lined lab buried underneath the White House. Some presidents installed bowling alleys; Lex picked state-of-the-art centrifuges. He was turned away from Clark, inspecting his domain. He sounded bored, except that Clark had known Lex far longer than Lex imagined.

“Lex,” he said without thinking, and Lex turned in an instant, his eyes widening. If Clark could have felt anything, he would have felt the weight of that gaze. Clark swallowed. “That’s my safe word.”

Lex’s jaw clenched. “Very well,” he said. “Take your clothes off and get on the table.”

It was shiny silver, clinical: everything Clark had ever feared from Lex. Level 3, but run by the most powerful man on Earth. 

Clark was shaking as he undressed, leaving his uniform in a puddle on the slick white floor. Lex’s eyes on him were unflinching, though Lex didn’t order him to face forward, maybe because it was just as disconcerting to have Lex at his back.

The table would’ve been cold, for a human. Clark sat on the edge, nervously curling his fingers around and struggling not to crush the metal between them. He hadn’t had this much trouble controlling his strength in years.

“Lie down,” Lex said, gentle in victory.

This was the stupidest thing Clark had ever done, and his career of dumb impulse decisions was _storied_.

Clark closed his eyes. Shortly thereafter, he felt the shock of Kryptonite roll over him.

If Lex cut deep, he’d make Lex stop. He shouldn’t trust Lex to stop.

He did trust Lex to stop. After all, Clark’s surrender—Superman’s surrender—was a victory all its own. The power to stop was a huge one.

“Shh,” Lex said, almost dreamily. He hadn’t realized he’d been making noise.

“You look …” Lex said, and uncharacteristically trailed off. Clark knew he was unattractive like this, veins bulging and making his alienness undeniable. If the rest of the world saw this, he’d lose many of his supporters even without the part where he was getting Lex Luthor to hurt him in the service of his own sexual pleasure.

Lex’s hand on his stomach was such a shock that he almost convulsed, clenching his fists and opening his eyes. Lex was barely touching him. Maybe not even touching, just holding his fingers close enough that Clark could feel their heat.

Clark blinked up at him, confused. Lex wasn’t even holding a scalpel. His fists weren’t clenched, ready to pummel Clark into a momentary mass of bruises. 

There were storms in his eyes like the storms Clark sometimes watched from orbit.

“You’re going to want to hang on,” Lex advised, and then leaned over to take the head of Clark’s dick in his mouth.

Clark had been hit by lightning before. This was nothing like that. The pleasure seemed to start in his spine and roll out in huge waves, arching his spine and blasting through every nerve. 

He came before Lex had gotten halfway down the length of his dick, and Lex choked for a second but swallowed, cheeks working as he stared up at Clark across the span of Clark’s body. It seemed to last forever, and when it was over, Clark was boneless on the table, staring up at the bright lights of the lab ceiling and wondering if he was ever going to be able to move again.

There was a rustle as Lex pulled away—he hadn’t even loosened his _tie_ —and Clark felt the familiar ebb as the Kryptonite’s effect disappeared.

What the—?

Dazedly, he pushed himself back up to a seated position. Lex was putting his lead-lined box back into some sort of safe, tapping in a code. There were probably other things in that safe that Clark needed to know about for his day job. He couldn’t have cared about that to save his life.

“L—Mr. President?”

Lex turned to him, raising one fine eyebrow. “I trust that was satisfactory.”

That was one word for it. “Uh, should I—” Lex’s pants were tented, obscene. Clark wanted to open the Kryptonite box again, touch him, spend an hour learning the shape of every muscle.

Lex glanced down at himself and grimaced dismissively. “I’m sure you have other business. One of the Secret Service can show you out.”

And before Clark could begin to formulate a response, much less a question, he was gone.

Clark sat there, mind all but blank, for some time. As various kinds of intelligence came back online, he realized that he was so far out of his depth that he might have been at the heart of the sun.

But Lex—

Lex wanted him. 

He didn’t know what that meant. Maybe they couldn’t ever be allies, much less friends like they’d been when he was only Clark and Lex was only Lex. But now he knew a lot more than Lex had, probably, wanted to reveal.

Before he left, he supersped into the Oval Office, where Lex was alone, reading reports.

“Next time,” he said, and Lex’s head snapped up, “I want you to use a knife first.”

The look of total surprise on Lex’s face was worth all the stomach-clenching fear he felt if he tried to think about the larger picture. Clark had learned over the years how to take risks—and Lex had told him that he could have this on his terms. 

He planned to see just how serious Lex was about that.


End file.
